Attention: ‘Wives’ has lots to offer
By Casey Gillis on May. 31, 2007
At the beginning of the second episode of “Army Wives,” one of the younger characters says, “I know how it works around here, and it’s worse than high school.”
You can say that again.
Lifetime’s new original series, which debuts at 10 p.m. Sunday night, is set on an Army post in Charleston, S.C. where there’s plenty to gossip about.
The prim and proper Denise (Catherine Bell) — think the Bree of “Army Wives” — is a victim of abuse, but there’s a twist to who is doing the abusing. This is Lifetime, after all. I guess they couldn’t resist at least one woman-in-peril plot.
Former cop and mother of two Pamela’s (Brigid Brannah) latest pregnancy isn’t all it seems, and her husband, Chase, isn’t helping matters by carelessly spending all their money. You’ll hate him for the first couple of episodes, but hang in there. He softens up.
Really stirring the pot is new arrival Roxy (played by Kyra Sedgwick look-a-like Sally Pressman), a bartender with two kids by two different dads who marries soldier Trevor after knowing him for only four days.
In the beginning, the show goes a little out of its way to paint Roxy — she of the short skirts and belly-bearing tops — as an outsider.
In one scene, she attends her first Army function with Trevor. When a high-ranking officer approaches, Trevor stands up and salutes him. So does Roxy. Come on — I may be a civilian, but I know I don’t have to salute anyone. She should, too.
Later, she spills red wine all over the table and her dress, leading to a ladies room scene where, wearing only a bra and thong, she washes the stain out in the bathroom sink in front of the much more formal Denise.
But it gets better, and Roxy really is a character you’ll come to love.
And if she’s the new kid on the block, then Claudia Joy Holden (“NYPD Blue” vet Kim Delaney) is the woman who has seen it all.
Married to her colonel husband Michael for 17 years, Claudia Joy is the one all the other army wives look up to.
She’s fiercely protective of Michael, and her claws come out after he’s passed over for a promotion because another wife, Lenore, started a rumor about him. Claudia Joy doesn’t take it lying down and confronts Lenore. But in their brief exchange, it becomes pretty clear that C.J.’s got some secrets of her own.
Rounding out our core group of gals is one guy: Roland, a therapist whose wife, Joan, is struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress after spending two years in Afghanistan. But instead of talking to her devoted hubby about it, she’s turned to booze.
There’s a hint of more to come when, after a night of drinking, she tells him: “If you knew what I did over there, you wouldn’t love me.”
This place has got more secrets than Wisteria Lane.
But just when you feel like the show is veering into cliché city, they surprise you by fleshing out characters that could easily be one-note (see: Pamela’s husband, whose likeability factor goes up after the pilot).
The end of the first episode brings all our Wives —plus Roland — together when Pamela goes into labor, and that’s where it all really begins, as we get to see this unlikely group forge friendships with each other.
After seeing the first three episodes, I’m hooked.
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